Is it helpful or harmful to go the extra mile at work? While generally regarded favorably, organizational researchers are increasingly considering the potential dark side of discretionary work behaviors that go beyond the formal requirements of the job. Can psychological research help organizations find a balance between the benefits and downsides of these discretionary behaviors?

Especially in the time before summer, people look forward to the beginning of their summer vacations. On the one hand, holidays are an integral part of life of our society and primarily provide relaxation and recovery. On the other hand, recent research shows that vacation effects fade-out quite quickly after returning to work. As such, this raises an important question: Are vacations overvalued or even superfluous? What do we know about this phenomenon and what needs to be...

Imagine the last bad day you had. Maybe you were jolted out of a pleasant snooze by a complaining alarm. You’re late. You’re groggy and in your haste, you spill half your breakfast on a freshly cleaned shirt—and the other half now lies in a puddle on the floor. You frantically try to clean it up as you scramble out the door to catch your ride. You look like...

To date, the refugee crisis has been a central issue for society and associated with several challenges. This article focuses on the well-being of refugees as a basis for successful integration. In particular, it addresses the question of how social support can positively affect refugees’ well-being and the consequences related to missing social support. In this context, a differentiation is made between formal and informal social support for... / more

There’s been a lot of talk in the news recently about Facebook, and much of the discussion has centered on Facebook’s role in politics and journalism and user privacy. But there are other discussions about Facebook’s product itself, focusing on users’ well-being and psychological health. Specifically, some political commentators...

John had just received a job offer from a company located in a big city. He was very excited about it and couldn’t wait to move there. He had been hearing a lot of vivid descriptions about the interesting life experiences he could have in the new city from his future colleagues, who have lived there for a couple of years. They told John that people in this big city are friendly, especially to the newcomers. Even...

Nowadays, smartphones appear to play an inevitable role both in our work and private life. However, when it comes to work-related use, smartphones can hamper recovery and thus, pose a threat to our well-being. In this blog-post, I review recent studies on how and when potential side-effects may occur.
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The beginning of the 20th century featured an understanding of health that was dominated by a biomedical perspective, characterized by a reductionist point of view in which health was defined as the absence of illness. This view has long been replaced by a biopsychosocial model that emphasizes the role played by socio-cultural forces in the shaping of health (and illness) and related psychological experiences (Engel, 1977). In 1948, the World Health Organization (WHO) defined health as... / more